Alive in Their Garden

ALIVE IN THEIR GARDEN

March 17– April 28, 2023, 12–3 p.m. Monday–Friday

Alive in Their Garden is a group exhibition featuring works across media by four artists of the Black Latinx diaspora, engaging plant materiality and aesthetics as portals of gender subversion, ecological justice, ancestral knowing, and healing.

Alive in Their Garden draws its name from a memoir written by Dedé Mirabal to preserve the legacy of her sisters, María Teresa, Patria, and Minerva Mirabal, who were brutally murdered for their resistance to dictatorial rule by orders of Trujillo. The murder of the three Mirabal sisters brought global attention to gender-based state violence in the Dominican Republic.

The exhibition invokes their legacy as part of the Afro— Latinx Lab’s efforts to break the silencing of gender violence in the Caribbean and its diaspora.

Download the brochure here.

Visit a virtual tour of the Alive in Their Garden exhibition at the LookOut Gallery

 

Biographies of artists

Felli Maynard 

A black and white photo of a Afro-Latine artist with long hair looking at the camera

First-generation Afro-Latine interdisciplinary artist, archivist and researcher, Maynard works across historical forms of analog and alternative photography. Through their work, Maynard is critiquing how beings from the African diaspora past, present, and future have been memorized by Western canons of history.

Star Feliz 

An Afro—Taino artist sitting on a sandy hill, wearing tall black boots, black pants with sand on them, and a tan top with long braided hair.

Artist and healer, living on Tongva land (LA, CA), Feliz illuminates processes of world-building as they braid back together the strands of life within their Afro—Taino lineage of the Caribbean and its diaspora.

Joiri Minaya 

A Dominican-United Statesian woman with curly hair wearing a bright red top, holding one hand at an angle and looking at the camera

NY-based Dominican-United Statesian multidisciplinary visual artist whose work destabilizes historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity.

Nitzayra Leonor

A black and white closeup photo of a Afro-descendant, Black Puerto Rican, and Caribbean woman with long braids, looking at the camera

Multidisciplinary artist, Leonor works with printmaking, photography, the body, and ceramics to develop a visual language based on her experience as an Afro-descendant, Black Puerto Rican, and Caribbean.

 

This exhibition is a project of the Afro—Latinx Lab under the Open Boat Lab research grouping presented by the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a multi-institutional Black feminist partnership directed by Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez and Jessica Marie Johnson with financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Michigan State University, and Johns Hopkins University.

 

 

Virtual Exhibit by Able Eyes

Visit the Alive in Their Garden exhibition at the LookOut Gallery

 

Always free and all are welcome!

 

The RCAH Lookout Gallery

C200 Snyder Hall, 2nd floor

362 Bogue Street

Michigan State University

East Lansing, MI 48825

RCAH LookOut Gallery